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AFF & YMI Announce Complete 3-Year “Empowering Youth” Lecture Series

February 21, 2017

YCFC’s Adolescent Faith and Flourishing program (“AFF”), in partnership with the Yale Youth Ministry Institute (“YMI”), is managing a $1.2 million program on “Joy and Adolescent Faith and Flourishing” (“JAFF”). The JAFF program is funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, supported by $400,000 in additional funding from YMI.

The JAFF program is guided by a national advisory board comprised of the leaders of the nation’s principal seminary programs training youth ministers. You can see a photo roster of the JAFF Advisory Board here. The ongoing work of this advisory board is: 1) to discern the 24 “practices, habits, attitudes or orientations” of the Christian faith that establish the critical foundations in adolescence for full, resilient, joyful and flourishing lives and the 10 afflictions or adversities that most often undermine an adolescent’s potential to thrive; 2) to recommend the leading scholars in the country working on these identified issues; and 3) to conduct original research and publish book-length treatments on one or more of these issues; and 4) to support the publication and dissemination of this new body of work to advance the proposed new focus for youth ministry.

As you can see on the “Comprehensive JAFF Lectures Flyer,” AFF and the JAFF Advisory Board have now completed their work identifying the issues and scheduling the presentations and publications by the identified scholars. The monthly lecture series began last January, 2016 and will run until December, 2018. The first JAFF symposium on these topics was held last June as part of the Yale Divinity School Summer Study program. JAFF will offer two more summer symposia in June, 2017 and June, 2018, respectively.

The monthly lectures are held at Yale Divinity School on the first Wednesday of each month. Lunch is served at 12:00 pm, and the lecture begins at 12:30 pm. The lunch and lecture are free and open to the public (RSVP here.) Those unable to attend can watch the lectures live through Livestream.